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This report covers the second meeting of the Global Programme Advisory Group (GPAG) of the Pathways to Women’s Empowerment Research Programme Consortium (RPC), which is a five year programme funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID). A group from civil society, academia and international development agencies, the GPAG’s purpose is to help ensure academic quality of research and effectiveness of the Global Hub communications strategy. This second GPAG meeting follows that held on 16-17 November 2006 where the advisory group reviewed initial research project proposals. Findings to date from these projects were presented to this second meeting. …

This report focuses on the results from research on case study organisations and donors, conducted in Bangladesh. Five women-headed WROs were chosen as case studies. Research included interviews with donor staff, document review, and validation workshops. This report synthesizes their findings and reflections based on the case studies, around three key questions: How have donors affected women’s organisations’ work and ways of working? What are WROs doing to raise resources outside of donor funding and what are the types of work they do which is not donor funded? What are the emerging pathways? The report includes an analysis of Bangladesh’s context and developments from 1995 to present, the national development-aid scenario, the influence of the Paris Declaration and attempts towards donor harmonisation; a presentation of the five case-study organisations; an analysis of the experiences of the organisations before they received donor funding; sections on “Life with and without Funding”; a presentation of the situation from the perspective of the donors; and conclusions from the research and presents issues of sustainability. …

A case study report of the organization BNWLA, under the umbrella of inter-country research on ‘Mobilising for Women’s Rights and the Role of Resources’ undertaken by The Research Programme Consortium (RPC) on Pathways of Women’s Empowerment. The case-study organisations were chosen to capture the diversity of different types of women’s organisations in Bangladesh which include small associations, professional networks, and NGOs. The case studies were compiled following the collection of background materials, individual interviews, and a day long reflection exercise which was carried out using participatory techniques. The case study gives a background of the organization, its institutional process, its national and international context, its timeline, its agenda and relationships, its resources, its ways of organising, mobilising and the changes that have taken place, its relations with the government, crises/conflicts with donors, and an analysis. …

A case study report of the organization BOMSA, under the umbrella of inter-country research on ‘Mobilizing for Women’s Rights and the Role of Resources’ undertaken by The Research Programme Consortium (RPC) on Pathways of Women’s Empowerment. The case-study organisations were chosen to capture the diversity of different types of women’s organisations in Bangladesh which include small associations, professional networks, and NGOs. The case studies were compiled following the collection of background materials, individual interviews, and a day long reflection exercise which was carried out using participatory techniques. The case study gives a background of the organization, its institutional process, its national and international context, its timeline, its agenda and relationships, its resources, BOMSA’s own reflections, and analysis of the relationship between the organization and donors. …

A case study report of the organization Kormojibi Nari, under the umbrella of inter-country research on ‘Mobilizing for Women’s Rights and the Role of Resources’ undertaken by The Research Programme Consortium (RPC) on Pathways of Women’s Empowerment. The case-study organisations were chosen to capture the diversity of different types of women’s organisations in Bangladesh which include small associations, professional networks, and NGOs. The case studies were compiled following the collection of background materials, individual interviews, and a day long reflection exercise which was carried out using participatory techniques. The case study gives a background of the organization, its institutional process, its national and international context, its timeline, its agenda and relationships, its resources, reflections on overall trends, its ways of organizing, mobilizing and the changes that have taken place, its relations with the government, crises/conflicts with donors, and an analysis. …

A case study report of the organization Doorbar Network, under the umbrella of inter-country research on ‘Mobilizing for Women’s Rights and the Role of Resources’ undertaken by The Research Programme Consortium (RPC) on Pathways of Women’s Empowerment. The case-study organisations were chosen to capture the diversity of different types of women’s organisations in Bangladesh which include small associations, professional networks, and NGOs. The case studies were compiled following the collection of background materials, individual interviews, and a day long reflection exercise which was carried out using participatory techniques. The case study gives a background of the organization, its institutional process, its national and international context, its timeline, its agenda and relationships, its resources, Doorbar Network’s own reflections, and analysis of the relationship between the organization and donors. …

Sohela Nazneen, Maheen Sultan and Naomi Hossain explore concepts of empowerment being used by some women’s organisations, development NGOs, mass political parties and aid donors in Bangladesh. Focusing primarily on public discourses, they review publicly available documentation of women’s organisations, development NGOs, mass political parties and aid donors. They discuss the implications of using empowerment by these different actors and conclude with reflections on new forms of public action and coalitions of interest to advance women’s power in Bangladesh. …

This paper explores how perceptions and narratives around women’s empowerment have evolved in Bangladesh from 2000 to date. It studies the concepts of women’s empowerment in public discourse and reviews the meanings and uses of the term by selected women’s organisations, donor agencies, political parties and development NGOs. By reviewing the publicly available documents of these organisations, the paper analyses the multiple discourses on women’s empowerment, showing the different concepts associated with it and how notions such as power, domains and processes of empowerment are understood by these actors. It also highlights how these different discourses have influenced each other and where they have diverged, with an emphasis on what these divergences mean in terms of advancing women’s interests in Bangladesh. …

As Bangladesh turns 40, improvements in women’s wellbeing and increased agency are claimed to be some of the most significant gains in the post-independence era. Various economic and social development indicators show that in the last 20 years, Bangladesh, a poor, Muslim-majority country in the classic patriarchal belt, has made substantial progress in increasing women’s access to education and healthcare (including increasing life expectancy), and in improving women’s participation in the labour force. The actors implementing such programmes and policies and claiming to promote women’s empowerment are numerous, and they occupy a significant position within national political traditions and development discourses. In the 1970s and 1980s development ideas around women’s empowerment in Bangladesh were influenced by an overtly instrumentalist logic within the international donor sphere. …

This report concerns the historical trajectory of women’s rights organisations (WROs) in Bangladesh and Ghana within the changing national contexts as well as the shifting international aid landscape in the last two decades and identifies the influence of external financing on what the organisations do and how they go about it. The report offers a model for how to study the question in other contexts and it can be used by WROs in other countries to reflect upon the relevance of the findings in their own context and to respond accordingly. The influence of international aid, particularly in the 1990s and the early part of the last decade was in many ways beneficial for organisational effectiveness. Recently the funding landscape has become more hostile with funders’ interest in rights and social transformation declining. …

This chapter describes the landscape of welfare provision in one small Cairo suburb and the roles and relationships that determine this landscape. The chapter focuses specifically on the Ministry of Social Solidarity as the state apparatus mandated with welfare, poverty reduction and social protection; it investigates the range of programs that are offered by the Ministry and by CSOs active in these areas. The purpose of presenting this empirical case study is to understand the dynamics of the relationship between the state and civil society so as to suggest mechanisms for coordination, mutual accountability and more effective welfare provision to better address poverty alleviation and social protection. The case study considers the ideals and norms of each player — the state and civil society — their perceived mission statements and the objectives of their programmes so as to understand the dynamics of their power interplay. …

Sohela Nazneen and Maheen Sultan analyse the impact of the NGO-ization process on the structure, autonomy and accountability relations of different types of women’s organisations in Bangladesh. They argue that the impact of NGO-ization varies depending on the resources, level of operation and the organizational motives behind adopting the NGO model. The impacts on smaller women’s organisations operating at the local level are an expansion of structure, loss of autonomy and a prioritization of accountability towards donors. However, some national-level women’s organisations have been able to manage the process through strategically mobilizing resources and prioritizing own agendas, thus retaining their feminist character. …

Is it possible to secure the desired policy action ‘infusing’ gender into existing ways of doing and organising things – and by so doing to incrementally secure real gains for women? Or will transformative policies for women's empowerment only be achieved through discursive and organisational transformation? But can the two be separated so neatly? Are there possibly unpredictable effects when feminist policy actors are on the one hand committed to changing discourse and power relations while on the other hand acting pragmatically to secure small instrumental changes? Taking international development organisations as the field of analysis, this article examines assumptions about policy change as a pathway of women's empowerment and goes on to explore a shift from a focus on institutional capability to one on actors and agency, and on strategies, tactics and manoeuvres. …

Most international development organisations include women’s empowerment and gender equality as a key objective. But what empowerment means and how best to support it remains a matter of debate. This brief by Rosalind Eyben informs that debate with empirical evidence from the five-year international research programme, Pathways. Pathways researchers from West Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and the UK used quantitative surveys, ethnographic fieldwork, participatory action research, life-histories, storytelling and film-making to discover how empowerment happens. …

In this article, Koggel reflects on the various influences on her thinking on gender and development, including a research project in Indonesia to explore the possible gaps between the World Bank’s understanding of empowerment and social science theory and NGO practice prior to mainstreaming the concept; capabilities theory and the difference between empowerment and agency; and the rhetoric of empowerment. She discusses the importance of contextual analyses and of the limitations of generalized policies or principles designed to promote ‘development’ or empower women. An important lesson for development ethicists is the need to pay attention to and analyse relations of power – including the overarching factor of economic globalization in the form of neo-liberal and capitalist assumptions and structures. Another important lesson is the one she learned from Sen's complex analysis of poverty: that ethical issues of development are as relevant to ‘developed’ countries as they are to poor ‘developing’ countries. …